


Day into Night

by Winterling42



Category: Portal (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-25
Updated: 2017-05-25
Packaged: 2018-11-04 15:40:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10993938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterling42/pseuds/Winterling42
Summary: Chell's abnormal relationship with the rest of the world.





	Day into Night

Chell spent her first night outside. It was the most terrifying experience of her life, and that life had included attempted murder by omniscient artificial intelligence. GLaDOS had set a pretty high bar for ‘terrifying.’ The open space was suffocating, the waving plants rattled just enough like turrets to be startling, and the roof was broken with bits of moon too far away for even the gun to reach. Chell spent a lot of time looking up at that roof, the blackness of it. Trying to make sense of the endless space. Even in her long,  _ long _ fall through Aperture and then her climb back up again, she had never seen space like this. 

That was what it was, up there. Space. Like one of the defective cores had told her. Chell fought the vertigo of falling  _ upwards _ by holding tight to the companion cube GLaDOS had given her. She curled around it like it was the only thing holding her to Earth. Like the moon was pulling her back up into that nothing where she couldn’t breathe and couldn’t move and the only real thing was the pressure of GLaDOS’s pincer on her wrist.

She didn’t sleep, the first night.

The moon came into sight, eventually. It had only been...however long it had been since she overthrew Wheatley. Out here, the light it gave off was silver and harsh. The grass gleamed like chrome, but it had none of the elegance or purpose of Aperture's test chambers. Grass was random, malformed. 

It smelled sweet.

Chell scrubbed at the dirty companion cube and did not look up.


End file.
